Time your exercise. Keep your gains.

A multi-year tax planning tool for tech employees with equity compensation. Model what exercising your ISOs will really cost and see, year by year, when you get it back.

Built by a lawyer. Priced like software.

Built for people with real equity and a real decision to make.

The tax bill on money
you haven't made

Exercising incentive stock options can trigger a tax bill on income you haven't actually received.

The spread between your strike price and the stock's current value counts as income for the Alternative Minimum Tax, even when the shares are illiquid and you haven't seen a dollar. People call it phantom income, or the AMT bomb. The bill is real cash. The gain isn't.

Exercise too much in one year and the AMT bill can run five or six figures. You get some of it back as a credit, but most people don't know that credit can sit unusable for years.

Free calculators stop where the hard part begins

Free calculators tell you this year's bill. They won't tell you how to sequence exercises across several years to stay under the line, when your AMT credit actually becomes usable, or how an early exercise interacts with your QSBS holding clock.

That's the difference between an estimate and a plan.
Vestrike is the plan.

What Vestrike does

Models your AMT before you exercise

Enter your grants, strike price, current valuation, income, and filing status. See the AMT you'd owe, the cash you'd need, and how it shifts as you change how much you exercise.

Modeling

Projects your credit, year by year

The exercise is one year; the recovery is several. Vestrike shows when the credit actually comes back to you, the part most tools ignore.

Projection

Tracks QSBS across both regimes

The July 2025 law created two sets of QSBS rules depending on when your stock was issued. Vestrike tracks each lot by issuance date, models your exclusion under the correct one, and flags whether your state conforms.

Compliance

Compares scenarios side by side

Exercise it all now, or spread it over three years? Model both and see the difference before you commit.

Planning

Every number comes from a deterministic engine validated against hand-checked reference scenarios, not an AI guessing. A plain-English explanation tells you what the numbers mean.

Built for people with real equity and a real decision to make.

Senior Engineers

With meaningful ISO grants worth planning around

Operators & Execs

Making decisions about equity timing and liquidity

Startup & AI Lab Teams

At companies where QSBS eligibility matters

If you've ever been told your tax preparer "doesn't really do equity," this is built for you.

Built by a lawyer,
not a software company

Most equity-tax tools are built by software companies and disclaim tax substance. Vestrike is built by a New York licensed attorney with Davis Polk background. The tax logic is statute-based, not algorithm-guessed.